Published in 1917 in the Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, this article presents the legal work and legislation being made to combat usury in the state of Illinois at the time. It includes provisions for a proposed law for meeting the loan shark situation.
EARLE EDWARD EUBANK was professor of sociology, Young Men’s Christian Association College, Chicago.
Presents the work of the National Federation of Remedial Loan Associations, founded in 1909, which gathered information and published bulletins in an effort to drive the loan shark out of business, with the help of the Russell Sage Foundation’s Division of Remedial Loans.
MALCOLM W. DAVIS, Division of Remedial Loans, Russell Sage Foundation
This pamphlet was released by the Russell Sage Foundation’s Committee of Education in 1925, detailing proper fireproof building materials and safety regulations to prevent fires in schools.
Winner of the 2017 Michael J. Hindelang Award from the American Society of Criminology
“In this timely and engaging book, Mona Lynch exposes and examines how draconian federal drug laws operate on the ground. Drawing upon extensive and meticulous research, Lynch paints a disturbing portrait of a flawed system of justice in which Congress has provided remarkable power to prosecutors to induce guilty pleas in drug cases by threatening additional charges that in many cases would double or triple the sentence imposed after conviction at trial. The failure of prosecutors to exercise discretion is matched by the inability of judges to do so, because decades-long sentences are usually mandated by Congress itself. Original, accessible, and critically important, Hard Bargains is a must-read for scholars, lawmakers, lawyers, and citizens interested in achieving more proportional and equitable federal drug policies.”
—KATE STITH, Lafayette S. Foster Professor of Law, Yale Law School
“Mona Lynch demonstrates convincingly how changes in U.S. sentencing and drug laws have concentrated the power to punish in the hands of prosecutors. Through on-the-ground research in three contrasting districts, Hard Bargains portrays region-specific ways in which such power is deployed. Weakened due process and the destruction of myriad lives, especially among African American men, is the outcome everywhere. This thoroughly researched and most readable book reveals the urgency of law reform.”
—JOACHIM J. SAVELSBERG, professor of sociology and law, Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair, University of Minnesota
The convergence of tough-on-crime politics, stiffer sentencing laws, and jurisdictional expansion in the 1970s and 1980s increased the powers of federal prosecutors in unprecedented ways. In Hard Bargains, social psychologist Mona Lynch investigates the increased power of these prosecutors in our age of mass incarceration. Lynch documents how prosecutors use punitive federal drug laws to coerce guilty pleas and obtain long prison sentences for defendants—particularly those who are African American—and exposes deep injustices in the federal courts.
As a result of the War on Drugs, the number of drug cases prosecuted each year in federal courts has increased fivefold since 1980. Lynch goes behind the scenes in three federal court districts and finds that federal prosecutors have considerable discretion in adjudicating these cases. Federal drug laws are wielded differently in each district, but with such force to overwhelm defendants’ ability to assert their rights. For drug defendants with prior convictions, the stakes are even higher since prosecutors can file charges that incur lengthy prison sentences—including life in prison without parole. Through extensive field research, Lynch finds that prosecutors frequently use the threat of extremely severe sentences to compel defendants to plead guilty rather than go to trial and risk much harsher punishment. Lynch also shows that the highly discretionary ways in which federal prosecutors work with law enforcement have led to significant racial disparities in federal courts. For instance, most federal charges for crack cocaine offenses are brought against African Americans even though whites are more likely to use crack. In addition, Latinos are increasingly entering the federal system as a result of aggressive immigration crackdowns that also target illicit drugs.
Hard Bargains provides an incisive and revealing look at how legal reforms over the last five decades have shifted excessive authority to federal prosecutors, resulting in the erosion of defendants’ rights and extreme sentences for those convicted. Lynch proposes a broad overhaul of the federal criminal justice system to restore the balance of power and retreat from the punitive indulgences of the War on Drugs.
MONA LYNCH is Professor of Criminology, Law & Society at the University of California, Irvine.
Over the last three decades, many young people without legal status became aware of their immigration status in early adulthood, an experience that can feel like “awakening to a nightmare,” according to several leading scholars. Their illegal status disables these young people in important ways—in many jurisdictions, they cannot get official documents, including drivers’ licenses, nor are they eligible for lawful employment, for scholarships for higher education, or for the skilled professions.
Winner of the Midwest Sociological Society's 2018 Distinguished Book Award
Honorable Mention for the 2017 Distinguished Book Award from the Sociology of Law Section of the American Sociological Association
Honorable Mention for the 2017 Max Weber Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section of the American Sociological Association
“Engines of Anxiety is essential reading for anyone involved in legal education or considering a career in law. In this meticulously researched book, Wendy Espeland and Michael Sauder show how media rankings have profound and harmful effects on how administrators admit students, deans allocate resources, and employers select applicants. The book’s powerful take-away is that, if law school was once an equalizer, offering a gateway to career opportunities and social advancement for people of modest means, today it serves to entrench the wealth inequality and status hierarchy that permeate American society.”
—Tanina Rostain, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center
“This splendid book unmasks the power of ostensibly objective rankings, showing how metrics create social hierarchies. Even though our collective enthusiasm for rankings seems closely tethered to America’s populist yearnings, scholars and consumers alike will be staggered at Wendy Espeland and Michael Sauder’s superb analysis of how profoundly transformative these metrics have become.”
—Walter W. Powell, Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology, Organizational Behavior,Management Science and Engineering, Communication, and Public Policy, Stanford University
“Engines of Anxiety is one of these rare books that will profoundly reshape how we think of contemporary higher education and organizational life more generally. Wendy Espeland and Michael Sauder provide a magisterial demonstration of how the quantification of performance is revolutionizing our world on so many dimensions. Their book is a ‘must-read’ for anyone concerned with some of the most important questions we face in our hyper-competitive world, namely: what is success, how can we achieve it, and how can we insure that multiple forms of excellence continue to flourish side by side.”
—Michèle Lamont, Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies, Professor of Sociology and African and African-American Studies, Harvard University
Students and the public routinely consult various published college rankings to assess the quality of colleges and universities and easily compare different schools. However, many institutions have responded to the rankings in ways that benefit neither the schools nor their students. In Engines of Anxiety, sociologists Wendy Espeland and Michael Sauder delve deep into the mechanisms of law school rankings, which have become a top priority within legal education. Based on a wealth of observational data and over 200 in-depth interviews with law students, university deans, and other administrators, they show how the scramble for high rankings has affected the missions and practices of many law schools.
Engines of Anxiety tracks how rankings, such as those published annually by the U.S. News & World Report, permeate every aspect of legal education, beginning with the admissions process. The authors find that prospective law students not only rely heavily on such rankings to evaluate school quality, but also internalize rankings as expressions of their own abilities and flaws. For example, they often view rejections from “first-tier” schools as a sign of personal failure. The rankings also affect the decisions of admissions officers, who try to balance admitting diverse classes with preserving the school’s ranking, which is dependent on factors such as the median LSAT score of the entering class. Espeland and Sauder find that law schools face pressure to admit applicants with high test scores over lower-scoring candidates who possess other favorable credentials.
Engines of Anxiety also reveals how rankings have influenced law schools’ career service departments. Because graduates’ job placements play a major role in the rankings, many institutions have shifted their career-services resources toward tracking placements, and away from counseling and network-building. In turn, law firms regularly use school rankings to recruit and screen job candidates, perpetuating a cycle in which highly ranked schools enjoy increasing prestige. As a result, the rankings create and reinforce a rigid hierarchy that penalizes lower-tier schools that do not conform to the restrictive standards used in the rankings. The authors show that as law schools compete to improve their rankings, their programs become more homogenized and less accessible to non-traditional students.
The ranking system is considered a valuable resource for learning about more than 200 law schools. Yet, Engines of Anxiety shows that the drive to increase a school’s rankings has negative consequences for students, educators, and administrators and has implications for all educational programs that are quantified in similar ways.
Wendy Nelson Espeland is professor of sociology at Northwestern University.
Michael Sauder is associate professor of sociology at the University of Iowa.
Western European countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have witnessed a significant increase in Muslim immigrants, which has given rise to nativist groups that question their belonging. Contributors Thomas Faist and Christian Ulbricht discuss how German politicians have implicitly compared the purported “backward” values of Muslim immigrants with the German idea of Leitkultur, or a society that values civil liberties and human rights, reinforcing the symbolic exclusion of Muslim immigrants. Similarly, Marieke Slootman and Jan Willem Duyvendak find that in the Netherlands, the conception of citizenship has shifted to focus less on political rights and duties and more on cultural norms and values. In this context, Turkish and Moroccan Muslim immigrants face increasing pressure to adopt “Dutch” culture, yet are simultaneously portrayed as having regressive views on gender and sexuality that make them unable to assimilate.
Religion is less of a barrier to immigrants’ inclusion in the United States, where instead undocumented status drives much of the political and social marginalization of immigrants. As Mary C. Waters and Philip Kasinitz note, undocumented immigrants in the United States. are ineligible for the services and freedoms that citizens take for granted and often live in fear of detention and deportation. Yet, as Irene Bloemraad points out, Americans’ conception of national identity expanded to be more inclusive of immigrants and their children with political mobilization and changes in law, institutions, and culture in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Canadians’ views also dramatically expanded in recent decades, with multiculturalism now an important part of their national identity, in contrast to Europeans’ fear that diversity undermines national solidarity.
With immigration to North America and Western Europe a continuing reality, each region will have to confront anti-immigrant sentiments that create barriers for and threaten the inclusion of newcomers. Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity investigates the multifaceted connections among immigration, belonging, and citizenship, and provides new ways of thinking about national identity.
NANCY FONER is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
PATRICK SIMON is Director of Research at the Institut national d’études démographiques (National Institute for Demographic Studies).
CONTRIBUTORS: Irene Bloemraad, Jan Willem Duyvendak, Thomas Faist, Nancy Foner, Gary Gerstle, Philip Kasinitz, Nasar Meer, Tariq Modood, Deborah J. Schildkraut, Patrick Simon, Marieke Slootman, Varun Uberoi, Christian Ulbricht, Mary C. Waters
“If you thought class-based affirmative action is the answer, think again. This provocative book, based on a rigorous study of current and historical trends in the United States and internationally, raises serious questions and challenges for both race- and class-based affirmative action policies. Bringing a timely and compelling perspective to the debate, Sigal Alon convincingly demonstrates what the most equitable admission solutions are for today.”
–Barbara Schneider, John A. Hannah University Distinguished Professor, Michigan State University
“Race, Class, and Affirmative Action is an important book, which adopts an unusual and valuable international perspective, focusing on Israel and the United States. It is remarkably balanced and free of the abundance of cant too often found in American discussions of affirmative action. Equally noteworthy is Sigal Alon’s emphasis on evidence-based findings and her frank recognition that there is no ‘silver bullet.’ Trade-offs are unavoidable—between achieving significant representation of racial minorities in the most elite universities and achieving a broader diversity at affordable cost. Neither class-based affirmative action (in any number of guises) nor a well-crafted race-sensitive policy is, in and of itself, a cure-all. Alon is to be commended for her practical, realis - tic, and hard-headed approach to a topic that needs precisely those qualities.”
–William G. Bowen, president emeritus, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
“In her new book, Race, Class, and Affirmative Action, Sigal Alon offers a powerful comparative analysis which opens new approaches to assess the structural determinants of disadvantage, yielding new strategies for productive policy development. Her insights open our thinking for forward movement in the United States, but also for other countries such as Brazil, India, and South Africa which are struggling with similar challenges.”
–Ann Marcus, professor and director, The Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy, New York University
No issue in American higher education is more contentious than that of race-based affirmative action. In light of the ongoing debate around the topic and recent Supreme Court rulings, affirmative action policy may be facing further changes. As an alternative to race-based affirmative action, some analysts suggest affirmative action policies based on class. In Race, Class, and Affirmative Action, sociologist Sigal Alon studies the race-based affirmative action policies in the United States and the class-based affirmative action policies in Israel. Alon evaluates how these different policies foster campus diversity and socioeconomic mobility by comparing the Israeli policy with a simulated model of race-based affirmative action and the U.S. policy with a simulated model of class-based affirmative action.
Alon finds that affirmative action at elite institutions in both countries is a key vehicle of mobility for disenfranchised students, whether they are racial and ethnic minorities or socioeconomically disadvantaged. Affirmative action improves their academic success and graduation rates and leads to better labor market outcomes. The beneficiaries of affirmative action in both countries thrive at elite colleges and in selective fields of study. As Alon demonstrates, they would not be better off attending less selective colleges instead.
Alon finds that Israel’s class-based affirmative action programs have provided much-needed entry slots at the elite universities to students from the geographic periphery, from high-poverty high schools, and from poor families. However, this approach has not generated as much ethnic diversity as a race-based policy would. By contrast, affirmative action policies in the United States have fostered racial and ethnic diversity at a level that cannot be matched with class-based policies. Yet, class-based policies would do a better job at boosting the socioeconomic diversity at these bastions of privilege. The findings from both countries suggest that neither race-based nor class-based models by themselves can generate broad diversity. According to Alon, the best route for promoting both racial and socioeconomic diversity is to embed the consideration of race within class-based affirmative action. Such a hybrid model would maximize the mobility benefits for both socioeconomically disadvantaged and minority students.
Race, Class, and Affirmative Action moves past political talking points to offer an innovative, evidence-based perspective on the merits and feasibility of different designs of affirmative action.
SIGAL ALON is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel-Aviv University.
"In 1963 The Center for the Study of Law and Society accepted a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation for the purpose of examining issues and perspectives bearing on the administration of civil justice. It was hoped that some ground might be laid for research that would be of interest to social scientists and of value for legal reform."
JEROME E. CARLIN, San Francisco Neighborhood Legal Assistance Foundation.
SHELDON L. MESSINGER, Center for the Study of Law and Society, University of California, Berkeley
In this 1966 book, Jerome E. Carlin, who was both a lawyer and a sociologist, marshals persuasive evidence that many lawyers do not consistently adhere to the standards of ordinary honesty, still less to the special professional rules in the canons of legal ethics. It calls for new and tough questions about the way the practice of law is organized.
JEROME E. CARLIN was professor at the Bureau of Applied Social Research, Columbia University, and the Center for the Study of Law and Society, University of California, Berkeley.
